A plasma display panel (hereinafter referred to as “PDP” or “panel”) is a display device that has a large screen, is thin and light, and has high visibility. As a discharge method of the PDP, an alternating current (AC) type or a direct current (DC) type can be employed. As an electrode structure, a surface discharge type or a counter discharge type can be employed. However, an AC surface discharge type PDP, in which the AC type discharge method and the surface discharge type electrode structure are employed, has presently become main stream. That is because the AC surface discharge type PDP is adequate to be fined and is easily manufactured.
The AC surface discharge type PDP generally has many discharge cells between a front substrate and a back substrate that are faced to each other. In the front substrate, a plurality of pairs of scan electrodes and sustain electrodes are formed in parallel on a front glass sheet, and function as display electrodes. A dielectric layer and a protective layer are formed so as to cover the display electrodes. In the back substrate, a plurality of data electrodes are formed in parallel on a back glass sheet, and a dielectric layer is formed so as to cover the data electrodes. A plurality of barrier ribs are formed on the latter dielectric layer in parallel with the data electrodes, and phosphor layers are formed on the surface of the dielectric layer and on side surfaces of the barrier ribs. The front substrate and back substrate are faced to each other so that the display electrodes and the data electrodes three-dimensionally intersect, and are sealed, and discharge gas is filled into a discharge space in the sealed product.
The PDP assembled in this method generally has a high charge starting voltage and discharges electricity unstably, so that aging is performed in a panel manufacturing process to uniform and stabilize the discharge characteristic.
In this aging method, rectangular waves having an opposite phase are applied as alternate voltage to the display electrodes, namely scan electrodes and sustain electrodes, for a long time. For shortening the aging duration, the following methods are proposed:                a method of applying rectangular waves to the scan electrodes and the sustain electrodes via an inductor, for example, (Japanese Patent Unexamined Publication No. H7-226162);        a method of applying rectangular waves having an opposite phase to the display electrodes, applying waves having the same phase as voltage waveform applied to the sustain electrodes to the data electrodes, and actively starting discharge between the scan electrode and the data electrode simultaneously with discharge between the display electrodes (Japanese Patent Unexamined Publication No. H9-251841, and Japanese Patent Unexamined Publication No. 2002-231141).        
Even in the aging method discussed above, however, it takes 10 hours to stabilize discharge. Therefore, power consumption in the aging process extremely rises, and the rising becomes one cause of increasing the manufacturing cost of the PDP. The aging process takes the long time, so that there are various problems related to the site area of the factory and an environment in manufacturing such as an air conditioner. These problems will apparently become further serious in response to future enlargement of the screen of the PDP, increase in luminance, and increase in production amount.
The present invention addresses the problems, and provides an aging method and an aging apparatus that largely reduce aging duration and have high power efficiency.